Chapter 12: When You Exit A Room You Just Enter Another One

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs wrote a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. Click here to read Chapter 1: G and B.

text by Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

Gideon did a great job above finishing his last chapter of this project. You can see that right? Don’t take it for granted that Gideon has talent.

He wrote about the beginning and the ending of things. When you exit a room, you end the experience of being within it, but of course when you exit a room you just enter another one. You are never not in a room.

This is the end for me. Everything has an ending, even an ending. This is the end of my ending. On Monday though, I’m starting Wellbutrin after almost a decade of not taking antidepressants, only mood stabilizers and Clonazepam. I am weaning myself off Clonazepam. Clonazepam, ironically, increases anxiety over time. I have been taking it for twenty-six years, never once having missed a day. Anything soothing will, after a span of time, become terrifying. 

(For a while I had a literary agent who was an idiot and when I sent him the first draft of my first book he seriously thought I should replace the word CLONAZEPAM with the word KLONOPIN for American readers. And he also seriously thought that I should drop the U from words like colour and labour so as not to alienate American readers, and this is the utter stupidity you sometimes have to deal with in life, and I stopped working with him when I saw his high school yearbook photograph and he was wearing a bowtie, and then I saw his Instagram and he was STILL wearing the bowtie.)

I’m wondering about NXIVM. About Keith Raniere and what about the women in his house who died of cancer from rat poison, why is nobody talking about that? I want to know what’s happening to him in prison and I hope it’s rape and beatings. In Canada there’s an allergy pill called NEXIUM. I want to send it to Catherine & India Oxenberg for their allergy to poor people. I’m writing my first novel. I thought it would be out by now. My first book was published on my birthday in 2019. I turned 45. In February I turn 47. I basically just started a writing career. I’m worried a gap of more than two years between books will damage my possibly ascendant career. And I worry about the book itself. All the time. I’m writing about science-fiction and basically everything my first book wasn’t about, cause I don’t want to repeat myself. But I want to make money, and I don’t want all the ‘fans’ of my first book (who are numerous and loyal and generous and thank you) to be disappointed or feel alienated that this new one isn’t about BRAD AND DRUGS AND BLAH BLAHAHLAHA. I couldn’t be more boring as a subject—this should be apparent by the end of this paragraph. I wrote a detective novel that’s an irritatingly postmodern book within a book. I hate postmodernism. I’m trying to figure out how to incorporate it into the structure of the larger novel. It’s fifty-five thousand words, the detective book, which is already the word count of a short novel. If I insert it periodically in the structure of the main novel, I worry people will lose track of the larger novel, become frustrated by the interruptions, or only read the detective novel which is admittedly more gripping. The best solution I’ve come up with is to insert each chapter as an endnote at appropriate points throughout the novel proper, but as soon as you think about endnotes you think about David Foster Wallace and I really hate the idea of what would likely be ALL writing about the book to be about Infinite Jest and the endnotes. Cause Wallace himself got super bored of that and irritated (even though everything about Wallace is obnoxious and fake and performative and of course he loved the endnotes and the talking about them), but I’m not like him. I wouldn’t get bored, I’d get upset cause I don’t want to be compared to him or have people think I ripped him off. I’ve been painting a long time and nobody can say I ripped anyone off. But with your first novel if its got a lot of endnotes people can say you ripped of Wallace, especially someone like me: a soon to be 47 oooh 12 step meetings type wears a thing on his head all the time white asshole with a chip on his shoulder or a seeming or perceived chip on his shoulder and even now this sentence sounds like Wallace. I hate David Foster Wallace. He threw Elizabeth Wurtzel out of a moving car.

People say they like the ending, they savour the ending, they wait and they wait, and they postpone the ending cause it’s so bittersweet this ending, but ultimately they want it cause they have to move on. But death, everyone is scared of that ending. That’s why religion and Jesus and the virgins and reincarnation and all the lies people tell themselves about a new beginning which is really not a thing so much as a choice one makes every day.

I am supposed to be working on a novel and making paintings, but I ordered books, some suggested, some chosen by me, and they sit in front of me telling me, “Brad, fuck work come read” and these are the books 
- The God Molecule by Brian Clegg (or Particle, some aren’t right in front of me)
- The Superrationals by Stephanie Lacava 
- The Incest Diary by Anonymous
- Child of God by Cormac McCarthy who I never read and who everyone says you have to read
- Serotonin by Michel Houllebecq which I ordered an advance copy of the translation and thought it’d take a lot longer to come out then when it came the other day I was like, shit now the Houlellebecq book is here and I really want to read it but also it’s a bad idea to read it cause his writing style might somehow influence me and then I’d be ripping off yet another shitty white guy with bad hair.

(I feel worried and upset that by listing the books above people will think I’m attempting to appear smart, or well read, or intellectual, or that I’m posturing or showing off.) 

My hair is also thinning and I bought Rogaine and am so ashamed and can’t believe I’m writing it down.

“2020 WAS A HARD YEAR EVERYONE LET’S PUT IT BEHIND US” 

You don’t want an ending. I don’t want an ending. I want to be forever beginning, but I’m not an idiot child who shits his pants and leaves food on his face so I’m forced to face the facts.

You do not have to be forced to face anything. You can shit your pants and leave food on your face and be accountable to nobody so this is what I’m offering you at the end with very little energy left wearing a pair of red Nike sweatpants that people think are ‘cool’ but really were just cheap and I bought them at an outlet mall by my parent’s house and they’re actually the sort of sweatpants that high school jocks wear in the suburbs. I’m wearing a hat because I’m scared to see my hair and my wife Cristine’s shirt which has a big circle with a stripe through it spray painted on the front like a NO or CANCELLED sign cause I’m cancelling myself before anyone else can or demonstrating that I know I should’ve been or should be cancelled. 

So it’s this:

Turn to Chapter 4 if you want Brad to quit painting and devote his time solely to writing.
Turn to Chapter 7 if you want Gideon to quit editorial writing and devote his time solely to writing fiction.
Turn to Chapter 1 if you want this to be published in some manner.
Turn to Chapter 6 if you secretly shoplift things like beef jerky from gas stations and nobody knows it.
Turn to Chapter 9 if you’re obsessed with Tao Lin but pretend like you’re not cause you’re frightened of judgment.
Turn to Chapter 2 if you don’t want this to be published.
Turn to Chapter 5 if you’re considering Christianity in spite of having seen dinosaur fossils in museums and can’t reconcile the creation story of Adam & Eve with what you know of science but still want to really give Christianity a shot.
Turn to Chapter 8 if you want Gideon and Brad to live long healthy lives.
Turn to Chapter 4 if you’ve ever been happy and the end of that happiness did NOT bring you suffering but somehow, illogically, did not hurt you.

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For more from Brad Phillips, follow @brad___phillips on Instagram. For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram.

Chapter 11: Penultimate Chapter Meditation

A Meta Method for When the End Draws Near (7 minutes)

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 1: G and B.

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

People emphasize the importance of beginnings and endings. One always wants to “get off on a good foot,” “go out with a bang,” “start strong,” “leave them wanting more,” etc, etc. These truisms are, at their core, about manipulation, and manipulation is, at its core, about control. If our “exquisite corpse serial novella” has taught you anything, which it really shouldn’t have, it’s probably that control is for suckers. 

With beginnings, we go from nothing to something, crossing the threshold into the experience in question. Examples: meeting someone, walking into a room, opening a book, etc, etc. We all know that the nature of this threshold crossing is the foundational stone on which the experience will be constructed. Change is what we notice. This is why we feel acceleration and deceleration, not velocity. This is why we place such a premium on first impressions. 

With endings, we go from something back to nothing, crossing the threshold out of the experience in question. Examples: breaking up with someone, exiting a room, finishing a book, etc, etc. We all know that the nature of this threshold crossing is the taste left in our mouths as we move on to other experiences, including that of telling the story of the experience in question to ourselves and others. In a sense, endings are valued because they so heavily inform the beginning of what’s next: our processing of what just happened.  

All that said, it’s the moment just before the ending begins, the gray transitional zone that marks the conclusion of the chunky middle, that tends to go underrated and overlooked. It’s here that people are most comfortable and, therefore, vulnerable, with the finish line finally in sight but enough race left to run that there’s no anxiety about what lies on the other side. It’s here, when we are simultaneously hyper aware of the finitude of the experience in question and still very much inside it, that we can really relax. 

So, relax. Soon, when things are officially almost over, you can start thinking about what you’re going to do when it is, in fact, over, but for now, just relish the purgatorial peace, the limbotic lull. Did you know the word “lull” has roots in middle english and latin that mean, “To quiet a child?” Whether you knew that or not, let your collicky inner child be soothed by the calming energy available in this unique moment of our greater narrative arc. Bask in it. Suck it like a fucking pacifier. 

Good. Now that you’re sufficiently relaxed, your defenses down, we can focus on the real goal of this meditation: to prime you in a way that allows for optimal enjoyment of the final chapter of our “exquisite corpse serial novella.” This process isn’t simply about getting you into a good mood so that you’re more likely to enjoy whatever comes next. No—what we’re going to do is have you prepare a positive expectation of how incredible the final chapter will be, and pair that expectation with a positive sense memory of how good it was. In a sense, we are going to create a mold in which your near-future experience of reading the final chapter can be shoved into. 

This might make it sound as if by predetermining the quality of your reading experience we’re robbing your future-self of agency, but that’s paranoid thinking. What could be more empowering than choosing your fate? What could be more enjoyable than guaranteeing your future enjoyment? Don’t be spooked—this is just what guru’s are really talking about when they talk about “manifesting.” 

So, let’s assign the final chapter a color. It can be any color, but be sure to choose one that you associate with good feelings, maybe love, excitement, comfort, peace, strength, etc, etc. Once you’ve chosen your color, imagine the final chapter not as a bunch of cold words on a page or screen but as a kind of warm, amorphous ball of energy that is, inside and out, your color. Anticipate how good it’s going to feel to enter the ball of energy, to cross the threshold between the penultimate chapter—your current experience—and the final chapter—the ball. 

Now, once you feel like you’ve spent enough time immersed in your color, once you feel your body and mind have been totally saturated by it, imagine exiting the ball of energy and finding yourself plopped into a beautiful home in the middle of a dinner party. There are a handful of your favorite friends there, and a few very attractive strangers too. The table is lively with conversation but you’re having trouble finding an opening to throw in your two cents. This makes you feel self-conscious, weak, timid, impotent, childish, etc, etc. 

Just as you’re about to give up, about to resign yourself to spending the evening sulking rather than participating, the most charming of all the dinner guests, maybe sensing you’ve been a little quiet, redirects the flow of the conversation toward you. Now, you have the floor as all eyes and ears at the table are wondering, “Have you read anything good lately?” “When was the last time a piece of writing really moved you?” and most specifically, “What’s a novel or novella that really nails its ending?” 

Normally, this much attention would cause your voice to tremble a little with doubt, anxiety, uncertainty, panic, etc, etc. But when you open your mouth, you suddenly feel like you’re back inside the ball of energy, or more accurately, it now feels like it is inside of you. When you speak, your voice doesn’t tremble. Much to your surprise, you sound confident and self assured as you tell your little audience that it is so funny they should ask because you have, in fact, just read something good, something that moved you, something that managed to both end with a bang and leave you wanting more. 

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For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram.

Chapter 10: First Class to Basel

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 1: G and B.

text by Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

Hi Summer and Oliver,

Thanks for this. I don’t like when people ‘break the fourth wall,’ but maybe Gideon and I have done that already?

It’s ironic, because when you sent me this document, before I even opened it I said I didn’t know if I'd be able to get my part done in time because I’ve been so mentally fragile lately. And then you wrote that you were worried about our mental health. So this is, really... I can’t imagine a sign of better editors, in that you seem to have predicted my current state of mind. I don’t know how Gideon is doing, he hasn’t responded to my texts for a few weeks, but I do see that he looks at my stories on Instagram. 

The book that I published last year dealt a lot with suicide and mental illness etcetera, and it was ‘autofiction,’ but really, that was just a sort of way to cover my ass if people didn’t like certain content—ultimately none of it was fictional. I ended up in the psych ward of the hospital twice after it came out, and if my new book wasn’t science fiction/incest based, then it would probably be about the story of an aging man who published a successful book, hoping it would ameliorate his mental suffering, only to find out that in fact not only was it unhelpful, it actually made his (my) mental health worse.

When I was thirty-three I had a solo show at Liste, a satellite fair for younger artists attached to Art Basel in Switzerland. I’d had a really bad year, my marriage was in the toilet, a lot of other things were going on. So I did this thing I often did (and, knowing what I know from the past should not still do, still do), where I put all my hopes for mental recovery into the success of my show. My ex-wife and I went to Basel, my dealers were billionaires and flew us both there first class, put us in a hotel room larger than my current apartment, gave me a daily stipend of five hundred Swiss francs, etcetera. That first day, I had to go to the building where the fair was taking place and help hang my paintings. Before we patched all the holes in the wall, Ivan Wirth and Manuela Hauser, who own Hauser & Wirth Gallery (which all my life I dreamed of showing with, and still do to this day) came and bought the entire show, seventeen paintings, hours before the fair even opened. This should have been good news...I mean objectively it was. I made close to sixty-thousand Swiss francs. My dealers put their Christian Louboutin shoes up on the table, smoked Marlboro Reds and drank Veuve Clicquot. They looked triumphant, and also a bit like they’d won the fair—like they were better than everyone else. And I performed ‘thrilled’ as long as I could then went down to the bar with my ex and ordered a beer. Once it arrived, I just started bawling my fucking eyes out, in full view of dealers I wanted to work with and artists that, back then, I felt intimidated by. Because what I’d wanted had happened, but I didn’t feel any better. I’d stupidly put all my hopes into the idea that selling out my show (or even having it go well) would fix my depression. When it didn’t fix my depression, I felt even worse. Because then it became, what’s it going to fucking take? That day I understood success was nothing more than a big shiny balloon. It looks pretty and floats around, but when you pop it, it’s just hot air and cheap plastic that settles on the ground like dead skin from a colourful animal. 

Worse still, was that I now had a lot of money, and back then having lots of money was very bad for me. I didn’t save money like I now do with my wife Cristine, using it intelligently to invest in the stock market or get closer to buying a home—I just spent it on dope, and Prada shoes, and similar bullshit. So while I want this to be good, what Gideon and I are doing, I know that whether it turns out well or not, it’s not going to make me ‘feel better.’ Mental illness isn’t contingent on outside factors like success or failure (although failure can certainly exacerbate it). I’m working on my first novel right now, and if I’m lucky, I write a paragraph a day. I don’t know if it’s procrastination or self-destruction. I know that, but maybe I’m wrong and think ‘I’m worse off than him,’ that Gideon is more mentally sound than me. Maybe he isn’t, though. I mean, I worry about him not having texted me in weeks. I’d reach out to him but don’t have much to say, like words of comfort or platitudes that mean nothing, and that to intelligent people usually read as insults rather than expressions of concern. 

When I buy a house I’ll be happy. But then there’s the renovations. When I have 50k in the bank I’ll be happy. But, then there's the taxes. When I show with David Zwirner, I’ll be happy. But then I’ll have to churn out paintings. 

I’m not even sure I know what happiness is. I know what relief is, and sometimes confuse it with happiness. What I know, I guess, is the absence of fear, and the absence of anxiety, and the absence of depression, and those things register to me as happiness. I suspect though that happiness is something different, like bubbling joy and delight at the world. I don’t know those feelings. Joy is just a name from the ‘70s, and delight is the second work in a candy I enjoy that it seems no one else does—Turkish Delight.

You can print this, add it to our project. It’s honest and real, and maybe this is the only honest and real thing I’ve contributed to this project so far. 

If you reach Gideon, tell him I love him, and I hope he’s okay, and that he can call me any time if he wants, but that if I don’t pick up, please don’t try calling again five minutes later.

I hope you’re both okay. Today they said Trump caught the coronavirus, so my face muscles moved into that expression people called ‘smile.’ This must be an improvement of some kind, no? 

XOB

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For more from Brad Phillips, follow  @brad___phillips on Instagram.

Chapter 9: Time For A Check-in?

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 1: G and B.

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

To: Brad and Gideon

From: The Editors

Dear Brad and Gideon, 

To start, we want to thank you for writing your “exquisite corpse serial novella” with us. When you mentioned the concept back in winter, we were immediately intrigued. It sounded like the perfect sandbox for writers like you two to play in, a recipe for something unusual and surprising. Over these months, it’s been fun to watch you ping-pong the novella back and forth, unaware of the other’s intentions and ideas, fingers crossed that it will result in something cohesive and whole. We’ve laughed out loud at some point while reading every single chapter. 

All that said, we’re emailing today just to express a few concerns. The first is that we’re a little worried that in December, the final chapter will be published, and the cohesiveness and wholeness we were all hoping for might be, well, lacking. We’ve spent the last few days reviewing the story as it’s been written so far, and to be honest, there’s just not much of a story to speak of. The chapters are individually compelling, but there’s no real traceable connective tissue or logic between the chapters. Sure, sometimes a character will appear more than once, but often these appearances are more confusing than they are orienting, and the reader is left a little out to sea. 

I know the point of this experiment was for you two to not have a plan, to not communicate, but after much discussion, we’ve come to the conclusion that it would do the project a tragic disservice if, when it comes to an end, it has the feeling of an experiment that failed. We’re not recommending that you guys tie a neat little bow around the narrative—that would also do the project a disservice. There doesn’t need to be a linear plot. There doesn’t need to be a plot at all. What there needs to be, in our opinion, is some small payoff for those who have been following along, some kind of ending that makes the project feel justified and complete. 

Maybe the issue here is more philosophical than it is editorial. Do we owe the reader anything? Is it our obligation to reward them for their time or our prerogative to do so? Is the goal of this project to make something “good?” It seems that you two have been more focused on process than product, which is, in a way, exactly what you should have been doing—we never like writing that feels like a means to an end. But, that said, it’s our job to focus on product, our job to make sure the result of your guys’ process is something we’re all proud to have worked on. 

OK, so now, with the business out of the way, our second concern is of a more personal nature. Basically, we just wanted to check in about your respective mental states. While both of you are known for focusing on dark themes, sadness, and suffering, often writing about life and death with a kind of nihilistic flippancy, there has been kind of a lot of mention of suicide in several of the chapters. Suicide is a fascinating subject, totally fair game, and we wouldn’t be bringing it up at all if you hadn’t started referring to this project as a “groundbreaking innovation for the murder-suey industry.” That line caught our attention, had us worried that you two might, in fact, have had a plan for how this thing ends after all, just not the sort of plan we had in mind. 

If this novella has, in any way, become a negative force on your mental health, we would like to pull the plug immediately, and make sure you both have the psychological support you need. Frankly, the idea that this project may be even vaguely serving as a container for suicidal ideation or stoking depressive flames makes us sick to our stomach. Your wellness comes first; the work comes second. We mean it, and to be very clear, we’re not just covering our moral and legal asses in case you guys aren’t kidding about the “murder suey.” We care about you both and are legitimately concerned. 

So, in short, please tell us how you are. We would greatly appreciate it if both of you could write us back letting us know if you’re OK, and if you are, then we’d also appreciate it if you sent over a few ideas as to how we might end this project in a way that renders it a creatively fulfilling success. 

Looking forward to hearing from you. The Editors

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For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram.

Chapter 8: Just Like a Crime Novel

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 7: An Outline Of Chapters 1-6.

text by Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

Hey Buddy,

So to be clear, what I write next will be chapter two? I can do that. I feel very tired. Only Cristine knows but I got picked up for stealing a Hyundai Elantra last week cause I was manic and ended up in a holding cell for three days, so I heard some bits of crimey type stuff from other assholes who were there, but all criminals lie. I’m hoping I can use bipolarity as an excuse for grand theft auto btw. But this is all going to be a lie. Art is a crime really. I always thought of visual art as - well wait. The last time I saw my dad he was in prison, and I was just beginning to get successful as an artist. I told him that. He was proud of me and said I’d found the ideal con, because art is like any other con - you create this thing which the world doesn’t need, and you tell them they need it. Then validation inflates prices, rumour inflates prices, and this thing which is inherently dumb and only clogs the world with more stuff becomes valuable. He was in prison for doing this water-filter scam, where he’d go to conventions with his friend Cecil with a pamphlet for a high tech water filter (this was twenty plus years ago) and a single prototype. They’d take tonnes of orders upfront then skip town to the next home show or whatever - there was no actual water filter. You said this,

“…citing that ubiquitous yet totally nonexistent study that claimed men think about sex every seven seconds…”

I used to be a harsh hypochondriac, and I think that was in part driven by severe physical and emotional neglect as a child. I wanted nurses to touch me and care about me, so I faked maladies, but over time I began to believe they were real, because of the trauma of neglect. It got complicated obviously. But, that line about men thinking about sex every seven seconds - I went to a walk-in clinic when I was twelve and said I had mysterious pain in my leg. They knew me there already. I took a pamphlet (I loved medical pamphlets because they helped me do research) on hemorrhoids, and it said that the hemorrhoid sufferer thinks about their hemorrhoids every six to seven seconds. At that moment I told myself it would be better to get cancer. Then in my thirties I got a hemorrhoid once and I found it was true, how often I thought of it. But, during the seconds I wasn’t thinking of the hemorrhoid, I was thinking about sex. Then I’d sometimes vomit because of the commingling of hemorrhoid preoccupation and visual imagery of tall women with small breasts. I grossed myself out.

I told someone who I respect (or who people I respect respect) that my new book was a crime novel, or literature hung on the skeleton of a crime novel, and she said that ‘genre fiction is trending’ and I got really upset. But I’m already eighty-thousand words into it. For sure I’m gonna feel like an asshole when it’s out, and even now I think if I chose a genre, I should’ve gone with Western/Cowboy, cause nobody’s gonna use that one. Literature people are the fucking worst. I don’t want to reiterate what you said, I’ll just say I agree. People love to be confused, and I do get some sadistic pleasure from the fact that if people don’t understand a painting I make or something I write, they feel that they’re wrong, or not smart enough. This is a total falsehood obviously, but being an artist or writer, you can really make people feel like shit, and that’s comforting to me, cause if I’m going to (and you as well) feel like shit just for waking up, then someone’s gotta pay for that. So this would be chapter 2? I admit to being confused slightly because I’m coming down on my Lamotrigine which is hard so I’ve upped my Clonazepam which I’m also supposed to be coming down on, so I’m sorta fogged out — but let me know if i’m getting this right. Also, I don’t want to speak for you either, but just want to make it clear I feel that I’m definitely too stupid to make any exquisite corpse type thing work. Even when I do have a broken bone, I come up with an elaborate story for my doctor that makes it sound more reasonable that I broke the bone, instead of telling the truth, which is that I woke up, stepped on the floor and the toe broke. I say I kicked a dresser. Oh and you do the sex writing, I can’t do it anymore. When I turned 46 my left ball suddenly dropped an inch and covered part of Garfield’s head on this tattoo I got too close to my nuts, and now I feel like I can’t write about sex cause of what happened to my nuts and Garfield.

CHAPTER 2?

He Married his Murderer

Chapter 7 - Just Like a Crime Novel

(I could be fucking this up because I’m doing what you asked and going true crime, but since I don’t know the story at all, I’m just making up a chapter that SOUNDS like it would come from a crime novel.)

Bobby ended up robbing the house on Granville Drive the night he last saw Gabrielle, the house with the asshole husband. The husband had turned out not to be an asshole but instead was married to one. The couple had done that thing television advises of saying their names; “Gloria” and “Brian”, to humanize themselves. They’d done it this way.

“Brian, I love you.

“I love you Gloria. We’ll be okay.”

They recommend that when dealing with rapists and murderers you say your name or your kids names, talk about them - “Our son Oscar just started walking!” They even suggest telling your attacker you’re pregnant when you aren’t, which Bobby didn’t like the dishonesty of. When he robbed people he told the truth about what he wanted and what might happen and preferred his victims be honest in return. Considering the circumstances he knew it was an unreasonable expectation. The personalization strategy made sense objectively. Criminals who aren’t set on murder could possibly change their minds in the heat of the moment if their victims could transform themselves from objects into subjects.

What he’d liked about Brian, what made him seem unlike an asshole, was that after “Gloria, I love you,” all he’d said was…

“Jesus pal, I was really looking forward to golfing tomorrow.”

That was honest. No my wife’s pregnant shtick (she was clearly too old) or any of the standards: “I’m not ready to die, I’m scared to die, You really don’t have to do this, I promise we won’t call the cops, I just finished chemotherapy, I’m a veteran.” Just some straight from the hip frustration at maybe missing out on a day of golf. 

Bobby tied Brian to a radiator and took the wife, Gloria, upstairs. While he bound her arms and legs she said something that shocked him, that almost made him want to go golfing with her husband. 

“Fucking kill him. He doesn’t know I have a huge life insurance policy on him the dipshit, cheats on me and thinks I don’t know. You kill him tonight, leave me an email address or something, and I swear once I get my money I’ll give you half. You’d be doing me a big fucking favour.”

Obviously she could’ve been lying, stupidly thinking Bobby would give her his email address which she’d then pass onto the cops, but, maybe she’d been serious. He knew it was strange that it bothered him since he was there to rob them and kill the husband since men needed to be exterminated. But he didn’t like this Lorna’s informal bluntness, plus she hadn’t helped herself by using the personalization strategy. A girl named Gloria had snubbed Bobby in college and he’d never forgotten it. 

He told her she was a shitty wife and stuck a sock in her mouth. Then he placed a stack of dishes on Gloria’s back and told her if she moved he’d hear it, and he’d come blow her brains out. She seemed appropriately scared so he went downstairs and untied Brian. He told him to go sit on the couch. Then Bobby, for the first time during his spree took off his mask. He sat opposite Brian and asked him if he wanted a drink or something. Brian said there were beers in the fridge, then apologized that they were Bud Lite, saying Gloria’d told him to get off regular Bud cause he was getting a “fucking spare tire.”

“That’s bullshit, I don’t like that,” Bobby said on hearing this, “you look good to me.”

“Thanks, and I mean yeah, she’s no Julia Roberts.’

Bobby’d never found Julia Roberts attractive, Cameron Diaz was more his type, but the point was clear.

A pack of Marlboro’s sat on the table. Bobby took out two and offered one to Brian, who accepted. Still wearing his gloves he lit both their smokes then leaned back, grateful for a cold Budweiser - the king of beers. He made a mental note to leave the butt and bottle in a pot of boiling water before he left so there’d be no DNA.

“I was sorta expecting this to happen,” Brian said. “The cops came by here a couple of days ago asking if we’d seen anything unusual. They were canvassing the neighbourhood.”

It dawned on Bobby that of course this would've happened since he’d targeted such a small area. He’d need to be increasingly careful.

“What did they say?” 

“Not much other than had we seen any strange people lurking around, that sorta stuff.”

“Did they tell you anything about me, that they had a lead or any evidence?”

“No, actually one of the detectives said they were frustrated, that you were good, a pro or whatever, knew how to get away with it. He said they thought you might be a cop or an ex-cop then his partner told him to shut up.”

“That’s good to know, thanks for that buddy.” Bobby said sincerely.

Brian asked Bobby if he could tell him something and Bobby said sure.

“In a way I admire you, you know, living outside of society the way you do. My whole life I’ve had this dream of just like stealing a car and buying a handgun and driving across the country robbing banks. I’ve wanted to fuck truck stop waitresses with meth head boyfriends and ex prom-queens with bipolar disorder working at Piggly Wiggly. That’s America to me. I’ve never got to feel truly American, cause I’ve never got to live the way you live.”

Bobby was enjoying drinking and smoking with the guy, it’d been a while since he'd had a conversation with a man that wasn’t about work. Brian seemed alright, laid back. Under different circumstances he imagined they could've been friends.

“Look buddy I gotta be honest with you here. Your wife, I don’t like her, and she sure as shit doesn’t like you. You know what she just said to me up there? She said to kill you, said she’d split the insurance money with me.”

“Are you fucking serious? I’ve been taking care of that bitch forever. Wanted to be an actress, the whole cliche - wide-eyed girl from Missoula takes the bus to Hollywood, ends up tending bar at a Hard Rock Cafe which is where I met her. In ten years she’s had one gig, sitting at a table with a cop in the background of a Law & Order episode. Zero lines, just sitting on her ass like she does here. Closest she ever got was she fucked Cliff from Cheers. Unbelievable. I guess situations like these, you find out who you’re really married to.”

“It’s really true. Buddy….”

Brian interrupted him, “You know you meet someone and you fall in love. Then one thing changes that was a crucial component of your initial attraction, of what seduced you so effectively. Once it’s changed, the remainder of your life becomes a compromise borne of not wanting to hurt your partner for having changed the one thing. Cowardice about hurting others causes so much suffering. Why I care about hurting this woman’s feelings, this I don’t know.“

Bobby agreed one hundred percent then continued,

“Buddy….”

“I think about this shit,”  Brian said, “you know here I am in this fucking disaster of a marriage. That’s me, that’s the life. I don’t have the guts to stop myself from living. But I could be living on a fucking houseboat in Arkansas with a seventeen-year-old wife allergic to bras with a thick accent and a cute lisp, fishing all day while she sells PCP at her high school. I could be a bachelor in Hawaii fucking lifeguards, and skin diving, and drinking beers with the locals, and going to dogfights. I could’ve been anyone. Why the fuck I chose to be this person I’ll never know.”

“ I hear you buddy, I do. Could you just shut up for a sec and grab two more beers from the fridge.”

“Sorry, it’s been a while since I’ve been able to talk to anyone about anything real.”

Once Brian was up and walking towards the kitchen Bobby shot him in the back of the head. A disc of skull spun into a framed photo and broke the glass. He dropped like a bag of hammers and Bobby heard his arm snap from landing under his own weight. Watching the blood pool around Brians’s head, Bobby thought that people likely don’t know this happens. Typically when you fall you prepare yourself, move your limbs or protect your face. Without that awareness sometimes bones break under you. So much can happen in the brief transition from standing up alive to falling down dead.

After the shot he heard Lorna let out a squeal upstairs. Bobby dropped his cigarette butt and beer bottle into a crockpot in the kitchen and set it to boil. Ordinarily he’d be transporting the stereo and whatever else he’d stolen outside but wanted to go say goodbye to Gloria first. He put his mask back on, lazily smashing and ransacking whatever was in reach as he approached the bedroom, where he found her surrounded by broken flatware. She was trembling and moaning, it was repugnant. He knew if he pulled the sock out of her mouth she’d give him the same spiel about cutting him in on the money. He wanted to leave her with some permanent reminder of their encounter. It wasn’t anything he’d done before, which would have the positive effect of confusing the police. Her eyes were pleading the way all eyes plead when they think they’re about to lose their ability to blink. Standing over her he pointed his gun in her face. She pissed herself, which is normal. Adjusting his hand, he pulled the trigger so the gun went off directly next to her left ear, the bullet exploding a pillow on the bed creating a bloom of feathers. She’d never hear out of that ear again which satisfied him as a gesture to Brian, who she’d so shamelessly offered up to slaughter.

(I’ll use the B and G thing again but we can change this. Also, does this mean that Chapter 3 now has to follow the narrative of this Chapter 7 and become Chapter 8?  Do what you want I guess, I’m sorta lost but this is normal.)

For more from Brad Phillips, follow  @brad___phillips on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 7

Chapter 7: An Outline of Chapters 1-6

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 6: Imposter Syndrome.

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

Chapter 1 

I’ll write the first chapter, but please know that I am very wary of being someone who takes charge of group projects, someone who breaks the silence after the teacher asks for a volunteer to captain the science olympiad team with an earnest “I’ll do it,” or even worse, an “I’ll do it” of feigned reluctance. I was never that guy in school. No way I wanted to do that much work. But I also didn’t want to be associated with any projects that I considered poorly executed, so unless my “I’ll do it” volunteer was smart, I tended to give so little effort that I could not, in any scholastic court of law, be considered a bonafide collaborator.

I assume you weren’t and aren’t a group leader either. Maybe that has something to do with why we get along OK. But our similarity in this regard, our relative non-assertiveness in group dynamics, leaves us in danger of playing a game of beta-male chicken in which we both insist on deferring the alpha position to the other. So, to save us from such a fate, I’ll bite the bullet, feign reluctance, and get us started.

I think it would be good to begin with a handful of vignettes of pretty straight narrative prose that seems freighted with meaning and significance. It doesn’t matter much if it’s actually freighted with anything at all. I guess that makes “seems” the key word here. I suggest this mode of writing because, in my opinion, this is what everyone wants pretty much all the time, to like art and not be totally sure why they like it. To be clear, I don’t mean this as a negative quality in a reader. I see it more as having something to do with our desire to feel stuff rather than know stuff, to sense that there’s more rather than having the “more.” It makes sense. We are a species that, at its core, doesn’t trust itself, and so, a desire to keep reading that can’t be explained is much more likely to succeed than one that can.

With this in mind, why don’t I make all these vignettes in the first chapter about pairs of characters whose names start with the same letters as ours: “B” and “G.” This will likely have readers assuming that I’m trying to say something about us, or authorship in general, or trying to send you a coded message, or all the above. The whole exercise will be nauseatingly self-referential, but nausea is only painful when moderate. Once nausea gets to a certain level of acuteness, one usually purges and feels better—it hurts more to bend than to break. Let’s get our audience puking right away. 

Chapter 2

So, as you’ll be writing this chapter, feel free to do whatever you want and ignore this “outline” entirely if you so please. That said, I think this is where we really need to sell the exquisite corpse element of the project, to satisfy our readers' curiosity as to how this little experimental writing conceit of ours is going to work. It doesn’t have to be too complicated. Maybe it’s as simple as picking up a couple threads that I began in the first chapter and running in surprising directions with them. That’s the pleasure of the proper exquisite corpse game after all, to extrapolate incorrectly in ways that leave you with a Frankensteinian drawing in the end. Let’s give people the Frankenstein they want, the Frankenstein they deserve.

Also, maybe you should switch genres here. Like, if my first chapter is pretty straight literary fiction, you could take a hard left turn into Raymond Chandler territory, or even better, John Grisham land. Isn’t the book that you’re currently working on kind of a pseudo hardboiled novel? Or just vaguely pulpy? Am I misremembering? Either way, it seems that genre fiction is very hip right now, one of those things that is so inherently uncool that it’s cool now, so lowbrow, shameless, and unabashedly manipulative that the literati are beginning to fetishize it. I would be very pleased if you make chapter two something worthy of a lonely top shelf of the proverbial airport Hudson News.

Chapter 3

I’ve been wanting to write some sexy stuff, so maybe I’ll do that here. I’ll choose a character from chapter two and devise some scenario that gets them fucking and sucking. I really like writing about sex, not because I like sex more than the the average fucker and sucker but because, as discussed, I am easily distracted, easily bored, and sex seems to hold my attention. 

For example, writing this little outline was starting to turn into a bit of a chore (and I’m not even halfway done!). After I quickly wrote the first paragraph, I purchased some socks on the internet, drifted away from my desk and took a nap. When I woke from the nap, I didn’t feel like finishing this outline, so I ate a snack. When I finished the snack, I still didn’t feel like going back to the page. Then I had the idea that we could write some sexy scenes into our project, and I drifted back to my desk. It was that cause-and-effective.

 I’m not trying to say something hideously cliché about the allure and power of sex, not trying to make the kind of wink-and-elbow observation that bozo uncles of the world tend to back up by citing that ubiquitous yet totally nonexistent study that claimed men think about sex every seven seconds. But I am pointing out that sex, maybe better than anything in this world, can grab a wandering mind. That is, sex sells not because we’re all so goddamn horny, but because flesh is, in a way, always the shiniest surface in a room.

 Chapter 4

This is where I imagine you pull back the curtain and start writing about us writing this serial novella. Sure, even our most forgiving critics might cry that, right here, in chapter four, is where things got a little too “postmodern” or too “meta,” but frankly, there was no way we were going to avoid talking about ourselves in this project.

Why is that? Well, I think we’re both a little self-oriented. Apologies if you don’t like that label. I know it doesn’t sound very nice. I’m not calling us narcissists, though. I just think, knowing you a little and knowing myself a lot, that we both suffer from distinct psychological issues that share the similar symptom of having our respective outward gazes constantly turning inward.

I’ll stop speaking for you now, and just say that my periodic bouts of crippling depression are what have made my brain my most urgent interest, my most compelling project, my most relevant subject. I am very preoccupied with how I think and feel. I am obsessed with my own experience of the world, not because I think my experience is significant or important, but because my capacity for mental anguish is a product of my thoughts and feelings, and my mental anguish is, by far, the most weighty force in my life.

Actually, now I’m rethinking my previous claim about flesh being so “shiny.” Pain is shiny. Pain is loud. Sure, it’s hard to do long division while your penis is in someone’s mouth. It’s impossible when there’s a knife in your thigh.

I’ve never had a knife in my thigh. I’ve actually never had a broken bone, never even needed stitches. (When people are aghast at these facts, I usually respond that I’m simply very graceful.) The point is, we both suffer from diagnosed mental maladies, and these maladies make us a little self-obsessed. So, in short, let’s do what we do best, and write about ourselves.

Chapter 5

We’re both pretty into suicide, huh? Maybe in this chapter I’ll introduce the idea that this whole project is actually wrapped up in some plan for some kind of murder-suicide performance piece. Maybe I’ll also reveal that we’ve been cheating this whole time, that I attempted to a rough outline of the project. Maybe I’ll even hint that the outline will be included in chapter seven.

Chapter 6:

As you can probably tell, this outline has started to feel like a chore again. I’m tired. I’m bored. I want to go eat three bosc pears in under two minutes. 

Write about whatever you want in this chapter. We’ll figure it out.

---

For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 6.

Chapter 6: Imposter Syndrome

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 5: Cheaters.

text by Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

Dear Ms. Jacobs,

If you’re reading this letter it means your son is dead, along with a much older man named Brad Phillips he was working with on some obscure writing project - a project which I think tested their endurance for suffering, a test they seemed to have failed. Typically, when you receive a letter like this, it will say, ‘If you’re reading this I AM dead,” and comes from a loved one in the form of a suicide note, or it comes from a friend or family member who is being stalked by the American Intelligence Apparatus (see Danny Casolaro). I wish for your sake your son had it together enough to write an ‘If you’re reading this’ (Dear John becomes Dear Mom) letter himself, but please try not to judge him too harshly — only now am I beginning to understand the amount of pressure he and his friend Mr. Phillips were under to — as they described it  somewhat pretentiously — ‘revolutionize contemporary literature’. Attached is a letter Mr. Phillips wrote to your son Gideon. Perhaps more letters will be unearthed. I wish you the very best and am sorry for your loss.

-Detective Leslie Morris

[Letter postmarked 01/15/20]

Dear Gideon,

Hey buddy. The bit about Ellen Page and Juno really fucking made me laugh. The hamburger phone, Bradley Pepperino etc. You really nailed that perfectly. I resent that I paid to watch that film in the theater where strangely, I don’t regret paying to watch The Blair Witch Project. I don’t know why I am connecting the two. I dated (married) a woman once and broke up with her in large part because she called sandwiches ‘sammies.’ Ellen Page is Canadian. Cristine is always, as are most Americans, surprised at how many celebrities in Hollywood are Canadian. But save Phil Hartman and Alex Trebeck (RIP x2), they’re almost always an embarrassment - Ryan Gosling, Justin Bieber, Rachel McAdams, Celine Dion, Harold Ramis - it’s endless. Sometimes I still get very upset at Phil Hartman’s wife for murdering him but who can I take that anger out on? I think William Shatner might be Canadian and many people believe he killed his wife, who ostensibly drowned.

Knausgaard. To use the argot of your people, oy vey. I tried it, I couldn’t get past the seventeenth page of him detailing how his father both bought him a guitar and showed him how to use it. (by the way I’ve never been anywhere more terrible than Norway - they push reindeer meat on you like crack dealers push sweet crack rock). In my head I thought this - Fuck you, you had a dad. And this - Fuck you, you had a dad who gave you presents. I think of the writers I truly admire, and I don’t want to out myself as a cliché male reader (I love Octavia Butler!) but, Nabokov, Houllebecq, Martin Amis — I think the most I can recall of any of them describing characters sounded like...I’ll try to break it down by writer, and remember as is often the case with me, I might be totally wrong or misremembering. Nabokov would say, “He had a limp and a cane he used with more labour than was truly necessary so that it appeared to be an accessory, an eccentric flourish, not a functional and needed item (I’m not quoting here, I’m impersonating). No his hair was brown his eyes were blank he was tall he was short - just a limp and a cane and you filled in the blanks. Houellebecq would be more like, “I’m pathetic and I like little girls. I’m damp and ugly and painfully aware of it. I feel as if I emit a strange odour that keeps people at bay, and know that my penis is unusually small and that my flabby stomach is too developed for a man my age. In short, I know I am a disgusting man, yet nonetheless, for reasons unknown to me, I’m able to maintain the attention of the occasional beautiful woman. Life is a mystery in this way, and the only mystery in this world that holds my attention is what draws a woman to accept the presence of my penis in her mouth or vagina.”  With Amis, and it’s been a while, it would be more along the lines of, “He was rich and he was fat and he was terribly South London.”

I think everyone is supposed to like Proust for the same reason people like Knausgaard, and they valorize Proust almost obscenely yet I’ve never read him, and I can’t say I honestly know anyone who’s read Remembrances of Things Past but you always see it on people’s bookshelves (maybe yours buddy). Most people think they can get away with saying oh yeah Proust and that Madeleine Cookie (sp) at a cocktail party or something, and that seems as if they’ve read him. Nobody reads him. Nobody reads Chaucer, and nobody likes light operettas except maybe psychopaths, or people obsessed with hot air balloon culture. 

I was relieved once, and I don’t remember the quote, reading an interview with Stanley Kubrick where he said something like the most tedious and unnecessary part of making a film is the DESCRIBING of places and people and things. EXPOSITION. I felt better when I read that, because I agree, and because I like Kubrick, but not in that fanboy way, and I don’t think they’re are all great and that in reality that space one is total garbage, and Barry Lyndon while being good is still not fantastic and if I’m going to watch a film over two hours I’d prefer it be a Bryan Singer X-Men one to be totally honest. 

Who knows if either of us can write. Sometimes as with art I think I’m good at ‘performing writing’, but this is also known as Imposter Syndrome and many artists suffer from it. Cristine will tell me I made or wrote something good, and I’ll immediately tell her she’s biased, or that I just — this I actually say often, “My paintings, it’s just a bunch of tricks. I don't actually know how to paint.” — anyway we’re trying our best and this is what matters, if you believe that trying matters. Sometimes I say, “Trying is Lying, or Deleting is Cheating” and it sounds like it means something but in the end I don’t believe it does. This is possibly true of all the work I do. But you Gideon write essays and criticism for magazines and they’re full of information which people can use to make decisions so your writing is inherently more valuable in an objective sense. I’m not putting myself down here, just being honest. I tell Cristine that too, I say, “Look babe, you’re a better artist than me, it doesn’t mean I’m being self-loathing or not saying I have talent, it just means I’m saying you have more talent, and that doesn’t bother me or make me feel bad, it makes me admire you.” 

We do both know how to do one thing, ramble. Or maybe it’s just me, I can take that on. Do you like the expression ‘dark passenger’? Like, “his gambling addiction was his dark passenger”...

I remember meeting you. I would describe you this way were I writing about it in a book — Gideon seemed trustworthy and robust, and you got the sense that if your kid was trapped under a car, he’d be the guy you could rely on to pick the car up with his bare hands. He tucked his t-shirts in, which I liked, and often wore this same mustardy coloured one, which worked well for him. He had a nice voice that was calming while being inquisitory and when he asked you questions, for the most part you felt he really was interested in hearing the answers. He bought me a mattress, and he prized tidiness, but not in a way that was anal or you felt like he’d yell at you if you didn’t use a coaster, although probably he’d secretly hate it that you didn’t, but was polite enough not to express it. This made me wonder though, maybe Gideon secretly hates me or my work, or my presence, but is just so polite he won't say so, and then I’ll remember your parents or that one is/was a shrink, and become paranoid that you have tricks to make me feel safe, while in fact i’m unsafe and hated. The tenses are wrong here but you get the idea, and that’s just how I feel today, not always, but you can see, besides the shirt and the robustness, no eye colour, or height, or style, or whatever. And that’s a true and full picture of you. 

But to get to the point, yes we must cheat. I like cheating. I like Clifford Irving’s fake biography of Howard Hughes and Elmyr De Horys (sp) forgeries. I like con-artistry more than I like sculpture. We don’t, please don’t be offended, we don’t I THINK have what it takes to do this as we (you) proposed. I thought about it, then became super overwhelmed and watched True Detective Season 1 again. So yeah. Summer and Oliver at Autre are super nice, and I mean so fucking nice it makes you wonder, like how can they be so nice (maybe they’re Scandinavian)....but I think they’d understand, and also maybe because they’re smart, not even care. It’s like a wall label in art, and this is how my perspective is the right one — if you read the label about this work we’re doing, you’d know or become suspect that something was up. But if you just read it, you’d enjoy it for what it is and not leave worried that someone sorta picked your pocket intellectually.

So send an outline. I have some ideas too, but I’d prefer to defer to yours because lately I’m not so sure of my instincts (outside the bedroom lol)....Not in the bedroom either….

When I lived in British Columbia there was a very famous mystery about the half century old corpses of two teenagers found deep in the woods in northern BC whose skeletons were holding hands and there was an old rusty .22 rifle next to them. Maybe we can be like that. Although, it does bring up certain issues related to Kurt Cobain, because unless one of those romantic kids could manage to pull the trigger with their foot, how the fuck did they shoot themselves in the head with a long rifle?

Mother’s Day is coming (it’s always coming, Xmas is ALWAYS around the corner), so Happy Mother’s Day to your mom. And whatever you’re doing today, I hope you’re enjoying it. I knew I could trust you from the moment I spoke to you, so I trust you still now, over what, a year later? 

There’s a newish movie I watched called Burning by Lee Chang-dong I think you’d really like.

Yours,

Brad

---

For more from Brad Phillips, follow  @brad___phillips on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 7.

Chapter 5: Cheaters

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 4: A Eulogy For Brad & Gideon.

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

Dear Ms. Jacobs,

Below, see a transcription of one of many handwritten letters Gideon sent Brad in the days leading up to what the two writers were flippantly referring to as their “groundbreaking innovation for the murder-suey industry.” It seems they weren’t exactly following the rules of their exquisite-corpse serial novella, and were secretly corresponding behind their editors’ backs the whole time. I hope these words give you some insight into their mental states during this period, and that some insight affords you some solace. 

-Detective Leslie Morris

P.S. For the record, we’re still figuring out who did the murdering and who did the suey-ing. It’s…complicated. 

[Letter postmarked 01/01/20]

Bradley, 

I hate that I sometimes call you Bradley. It’s what Ellen Page’s character in that movie Juno would call her best friend if her best friend was named Brad. She’d pick up her hamburger phone, dial your number, and do a quirky dance while waiting for you to pick up. You’d pick up, and say, “Hello,” like a normal person, and she’d say, “Hello, this is Juno MacGuff’s assistant. May I please speak with Bradley Phillipino?” in a kind of faux formal voice. Then you’d have to decide whether to be a good sport and go along with the bit—“Hello, this is Bradley Phillipino’s assistant. Can you please put Ms. MacGuff on the line? Mr. Phillipino is a very busy man.”—or be a buzzkill. 

I could go on with this scenario, and maybe go on so long that I accidentally write a very bad sequel to the movie, which, in spite of its Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, is already very bad, but I’ll shut up about Juno now, mostly because I know that you know exactly what I am getting at and, therefore, know exactly how much I hate myself for sometimes calling you Bradley, Bradley. 

But Bradley, (how annoying is this?) the real reason I’m writing to you today is to talk about writing. (“Keep moving, nothing to see here, just a couple writers talking about their fucking CRAFT.”) In short, I don’t think I like it. That’s such a cliché, to hate writing, and if we’re gonna talk about that we might as well murder-suey now, before we even embark on our “exquisite corpse serial novella.” (Did you know George Eastman’s suicide note ended with the beautifully sincere question, “Why wait?) But I’m serious, Bradley. Cliché or not, I don’t like writing. Maybe it’s not that I don’t like writing—I definitely don’t though—but that I don’t like boring writing, and approximately 95% of all writing I encounter, both others and my own, bores me terribly. I start many books and finish few of them. I write every day but usually quit after an hour or so. 

I am especially bored by all descriptive language. My favorite conversation we’ve ever had about writing was about how neither of us really cares about description. We agreed that we don’t really give a shit what stuff looks like unless it’s directly relevant to the story. Do you remember that conversation? Did I dream it? Just in case I did dream it, I’ll reiterate that while it seems like all good writers spend a lot of time painting a picture, setting the visual scene, my eyes tend to speed read straight through those chunks. 

But I don’t know. Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe we’re weird. Maybe if we spent more time writing descriptively people would like our stuff more. Maybe I should start the “exquisite corpse serial novella” like this:

“I met Bradley on a very classically gross summer evening in New York City, the sort of night when the city stinks and everything is slightly muffled by the heat and humidity, as if the air’s moisture is rounding the edges of every sound, or maybe it’s not ‘as if’ that’s what’s happening but that’s what’s actually happening and I just don’t understand the physics of it. Bradley was tall and thin, so I guess that would mean lanky. But the word that comes to mind is sinewy, a build Jesus might have if Jesus had a pretty moderately used Crunch Gym membership. Bradley was also heavily tattooed and bearded, a look that, in artsy corners, allows him the flexibility to look like shit if he feels like looking like shit, or look good if he feels like looking good. I’m not sure how to explain that specific aesthetic phenomenon. I guess it is, in a way, also kind of Jesus-y, in that Jesus could easily blend in with the sick and poor, but, in a different context, could pass as the Son of God, the King of the Jews, The Light of the World.” 

Etc, etc, etc. OK, I’m not saying that the paragraph above is good. Please don’t judge it. I wrote it very quickly to prove a point, the point being that, if I ever throw that kind of paragraph into a story I’m working on, it is probably out of some perceived literary obligation to do so. Maybe what I’m really getting at is that, when it comes to art, I just don’t really care about details. This is partially why Knausgard’s books sound like my worst nightmare. From what I understand, that guy spends like 50 pages describing what’s in his fridge. I like that as a concept, but I don’t need to actually read those 50 pages, as the concept, his insane and meticulous commitment to mundanity, is the art. I’d get more out of listening to a smart person tell me about his book for ten minutes than spending a summer struggling through Knauzy’s big ol’ struggle. 

This actually reminds me of another conversation we once had about wall text at museums. Do you remember that conversation? I was interviewing you for that magazine. Or did I dream it again? Basically, we realized that although we are similar in some ways, we are very different in others, one of them being our policies around museum wall text. I read all wall text because I need an intellectual entrypoint in order to enjoy art, as thinking about it is half the fun. You don’t read wall text because you think it’s VISUAL art, and if you can’t LOOK at it and get something out of it, it’s probably very bad. Different strokes for different jokes.

Bradley, I think it’s time to cut to the chase of this letter. I can feel that we’re reaching that point, kind of like when you’re hanging out with someone and you realize you’re both ready to stop hanging out, or when you’re on a date and you realize it’s time to kiss. But we shouldn’t kiss, for the sake of our friendship, so I’ll cut to the chase instead: I am about to start writing the first chapter of our “exquisite corpse serial novella,” a phrase I continue to put quotes around because, although I came up with it, I hate it, and it’s good to mock what you hate, otherwise IT MOCKS YOU. 

What I’m wondering is if it behooves us to, well, cheat, to make some kind of masterful grand plan for this project, to outline a story that is very epic and very good, and then execute it in a way that appears to be totally spontaneous. This would, of course, require us to keep the writing raw and unpolished, to throw in lots of deadend plot lines, having characters weave in and out of seemingly unrelated realities. We’d have to make efforts to keep up the exquisite corpse ruse. 

Personally, I think this is the way to go. If you agree, my next letter will be a possible outline of the entire fucking thing. What do you think? If it it doesn’t work, if people start to realize that this improv show is, in fact, a well-reherased routine, who fucking cares. If the whole project is a dud, also who cares. We’re going to be sipping daiquiris with Yahweh and Lord Vishnu by the time the sticks and stones hit their targets. 

Happy New Year, -Gideon

---

For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 6: Imposter Syndrome.

Chapter 4: A Eulogy For Brad & Gideon

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 3: Luridly Liminal / Liminally Lurid.

text by Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

Here is a list. I’ve yet to meet a person who does not like a list. In fact, a person who does not like a list seems, to some extent, unhinged.

Bahrain & Germany

Barbados & Greenland

Guatemala & Bolivia

Georgia & Benin

Botswana & Greece

Bhutan & Guyana

Gabon & Burkina Faso

Gambia & Belgium

Brunei & Grenada

Bulgaria & Ghana

Guinea-Bissau & Brazil

Gabon & Burundi 

Ten Minutes Later 

Good & Bad

Beautiful & Grotesque

---

On discovering the text, the repeated use of names starting with G and B (obviously signifying Gideon & Brad) was seen as clever. Were they both still alive to read that adjective, ‘clever,’ one can only assume that Jacobs and Phillips would most likely feel hurt, as to many writers and artists, being called clever registers like a punch in the stomach — but only if the intellect is stored in the gastrointestinal system, where it most obviously is not. Writing allows these nonsensical connections. Nonsensical connections generated much of the text they wrote together. We must do our best to explore the elasticity of language and meaning! (a corny line seen in an early essay written by Phillips on the work of New York based photographer Daniel Arnold, who was a personal friend of Jacobs’). In reality, there’s nothing particularly bad (and on further examining the text, it can be seen that the two writers hint at Buddhist ideas of good and bad, right and wrong, being nothing more than constructs; constructs that have no moral or critical purpose or value. Two white guys talking obliquely about Buddhism — I’m certain were they given the opportunity to reflect, both would agree the writing could’ve been more successful without those esoteric tangents about being clever. Clever is fine, so long as it functions as an ornamental flourish attached to words like: genius, insightful, intellectual, transcendent, prescient, and brilliant. 

In the world of coding, gaming, no one faults the most gifted game designer for throwing in a few ‘easter eggs.’ Clever is a signature, and its manifestations can be seen as simple gifts, offerings — generous and kindhearted acknowledgements of the game players commitment to the game.

Spot the B in Barack (chapter 3) — Gideon is tipping his hat to Brad, as well as thanking the reader. Spot the G in Gordon (chapter 2) — Brad is tipping his hat to Gideon, as well as thanking the reader. 

These two writers, talented or as untalented as time will judge them to be, were, if nothing else, grateful for having been read. They sought to please their readers while also challenging themselves to produce quality literature. This seems like a kind and pleasant thing to do, but god knows that considering the audience is often viewed as tantamount to blatant pandering. Were she still alive, Michiko Kakutani might’ve focused on this desire to be kind and pleasant to the reader as a means to eviscerate the entire project; to label Jacobs and Phillips as hacks. Of the two, one might’ve been able to endure such an assault. Having known them both to some extent, I can attest to the fact that Burundi, as opposed to Guatemala, would most likely perish from the insult. Within any type of couple (including a couple of writers), as much as people don't like to admit it, there is always a weaker member of the team. Phillips being much older than Jacobs and far less robust, Jacobs being much more fit, both physically and mentally — I feel safe in assuming that Phillips wouldn’t have been able to weather the blow, whereas Jacobs, full of the buoyancy of youth, would’ve found a way to soldier on.

Ms. Kakutani. You remain forever the prettiest girl in high school. We want you to notice us, even take us up on our offer to carry your books, but the likelihood of your rejection is so terrifying that few are able to muster the courage and make the gesture. 

---

In early February of 2020, Brad and his wife Cristine spent a week in Gideon’s spare room, Gideon having offered it out of kindness, as Cristine had an art exhibition open on Henry Street, and Brad (along with Gideon) were part of a reading at Honey’s Brew Pub just blocks from Gideon’s home in Ridgewood. They wouldn’t have been able to spend a week in New York without Gideon’s generosity. Brad and Cristine were able to have dinner with Verne Dawson and his wife Laura, and the next day visit some galleries uptown with Verne.

Verne had long been Brad’s favourite painter, and he’d recently published an essay on Verne’s work for Autre Magazine. Brad ‘looked up’ to Verne, but not really, but also — sort of he did. He and Cristine enjoyed hanging out with older people, and while Brad was past the age at which one is susceptible to starstruckedness, he did feel a not insignificant sense of frisson being near someone—being listened to and fed by someone—who he’d admired so much two decades before. Verne had also finished Brad’s portrait, which he’d begun in October. Brad liked the painting. Verne said that he thought Brad looked like Saint Jerome in it, and Brad nodded and smiled and agreed, with no idea whatsoever of what Saint Jerome looked like. Later he asked Cristine if it were even possible for there to be an agreement about what a saint might look like, seeing as they all existed before photography. Cristine’s reply on the train back to Queens was,

“Let’s thumb fight.”

---

For more from Brad Phillips, follow  @brad___phillips on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 5: Cheaters.

Chapter 3: Luridly Liminal / Liminally Lurid by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 2: Guillermo’s Funeral.

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

There are basically three ways to acquire a nickname. 

The first way requires patience. You have to just go about your business and wait for the pack member most likely to be a nicknamer—usually a jokester, a talker, someone inclined to build intimacy via power plays disguised as teasing—to come up with your nickname. For example, say you work in an office building and the lobby floors of your office building have just been mopped, and while running to catch an elevator, you slip but regain your balance, narrowly avoiding a banana-peel pratfall. When you enter the elevator, the nicknamer says something like, “Close call there, Slippy,” in front of a handful of your colleagues. They laugh. Now you’re Slippy. After this, you will gradually lose your office identity as John. Your colleagues will think it’s funny that most new hires don’t even know your real name. Every so often, you will be asked to explain the origin story of Slippy, and you’ll have to tell the origin story, or lie and say you don’t remember it.

The second way to acquire a nickname requires planning. It’s similar to the first way, except in this case, you have at least some chance of choosing your nickname. For example, if you would like to be called “Ham,” you can increase the chances of that happening by packing a ham sandwich for lunch every day, and when people ask what you’re eating, don’t reply, “A ham sandwich,” but instead just say, “Ham,” with a mouthful of half-chewed ham. This would still leave a lot up to chance, though. If you’re really set on a nickname, it’s best to manufacture some overlapping meanings. To increase the likelihood of acquiring a nickname like Ham, you could make a habit of telling funny, theatrical, and embellished stories, as this might prompt one of your colleagues to say, “John, you’re such a ham,” in front of the nicknamer, who then will probably put the pieces together—John is a ham who loves ham. After that, the nicknamer will do what he does best. 

The third way to acquire a nickname requires persistence. Most people think you can’t give yourself a nickname. The conventional wisdom is that nicknames only stick if they are arrived at organically and assigned by others, but the conventional wisdom doesn’t account for a pathological kind of obstinance and a socially inappropriate level of compulsiveness. That is, you can be sure to always introduce yourself as your nickname, and if anyone asks you what your real name is, you just matter-of-factly say your nickname again. And if anyone calls you by your real name, you kindly but firmly correct them. And if anyone calls you by your real name even after you’ve kindly but firmly corrected them, you make it clear there are repercussions for doing so, that physical violence is a strong possibility. Essentially, you just function like good totalitarian governments do, bludgeoning the old narrative out of existence with consistent and relentless messaging of a new narrative, and of course, literally bludgeoning anyone who won’t allow the old narrative to expire. 

This third way of acquiring a nickname is how I acquired the nickname Liminal Phil. I chose Liminal Phil because a few years ago I found out what the word liminal meant while using the internet in the computer room. According to Wikipedia, there are many complicated meanings of liminal, especially in anthropology, psychology, and religion. I really like all of these meanings, but I mostly like the more general concept of liminality when it refers to an in-between space. As far as I understand it, these sorts of spaces aren't really spaces at all because they have no definition, no spatial identity. They exist somewhere that doesn’t officially exist, in the theoretical split second when you have left one zone but have yet to enter the next one. This ontological—another word I recently learned in the computer room—paradox raises a lot of questions: Where are you when you’re neither here nor there? Do you disappear when in a liminal space? If so, where have you disappeared to? What realm are you in? 

It was when I first finished reading the Wikipedia page about liminality on some quiet weeknight a few years ago that I started believing in God a little bit. I hate believing in God. Believing in God is very dumb and very embarrassing. But that Wikipedia page got me thinking about how all the really wise people in history lived in liminal states. I hate to use Jesus as an example because using Jesus as an example is also very dumb and very embarassing, but the miracle of that guy was that he lived in between the earthly world and the divine one. He was simultaneously walking amongst us mortals and walking amongst the divine. He was, as they say, both man and God. 

So, in one of my more dramatic moments, I decided, right then and there, that I too was going to be both man and God, flesh and spirit, a two-passport-carrying dual-citizen of this world and the next. I didn’t want to join the clergy though. I like to fuck too much for that. So, I started meditating every morning, reading the bible every night, and began the process of acquiring the nickname, or maybe more appropriately, rebaptizing myself, Liminal Phil. My name is John though, but I knew that if I kept any remnants of my old identity the new one had no chance of sticking.  

---

Here’s another “intellectual” porn—this one rejected by Luridmax—for you to masturbate to or, depending on your sexual proclivities, just read and wonder, “What kind of person masturbates to this?”

Gary was interviewing a young man named Barack for a job as an accountant at his crumbling creative agency. This was an interview he would normally have conducted with his best friend/founding partner, but a few months ago, his best friend/founding partner was coked up enough during a morning meeting to believe that she could surreptitiously blow a bump of coke in a morning meeting. When Gary confronted her about the incident, she said, “I’ve just been under a lot of pressure lately,” an explanation so cliché and pathetic that Gary saw it as a greater transgression than the incident itself, so he offered to buy her out of the agency right then and there. They made a handshake deal, and now Gary was stuck interviewing Barack alone, while his best friend/founding partner spent her days meditating and surfing. 

Barack was just out of college, and had a lanky build, slumped shoulders, and a manipulatively soft, eager-to-please smile that made Gary certain that he was both hyper intelligent and sexually deviant. For the first few minutes of the interview, Gary did his best to euphemistically explain that the agency was in trouble, that their books were a mess, that he needed an accounting whiz for the price of a summer intern. Then, when he started to properly interview Barack, as in, ask questions for Barack to answer, he began to see flashes of the young man climbing underneath the desk and slowly licking his dick from base to tip, base to tip, base to tip. These flashes didn’t feel like fantasy, though. They sat in Gary’s mind’s eye in a different way. They were more vivid, less malleable, as if he had stumbled across them rather than authored them. Gary wondered if the visions of mid-interview felatio weren’t fantasy, but prophecy. 

Gary tried focusing, tried to come up with good questions—“What’s it like to share a name with the most popular president in recent memory?”—but the image of Barack’s tongue sliding down the length of his dick was simply too loud to be competed with. So, he just sat in front of Barack, folding and unfolding his resume, biting his lip and shifting in his chair. There was an inappropriately long silence. Barack was concerned and confused.

Then Barack saw it: wedged between the fabric of Gary’s pants and his left thigh was an above-average sized, objectively handsome-looking hard dick. Barack stared at Gary’s erection, and Gary stared at Barack staring at his erection. Gary held his breath, squirming, waiting for Barack to raise his gaze so he could exhale, but Barack kept his eyes trained on the dick, not just because he was enjoying looking at it, but because he enjoyed making the man squirm.

In these few seconds, the power dynamic of the room shifted so drastically, it was as if there had been a change in some basic law of physics. Barack, who was previously on the edge of his seat, trying to look attentive, now leaned back in his chair. Gary, a heavy man who took up a lot of space, now seemed blimpish, still taking up a lot of space, but possibly vulnerable to a stiff wind. Any nerves Barack had felt going into the interview were gone. He felt utterly in control. He could take a shit on the floor and the job might still be his. 

But Barack didn’t really want the job. It would clearly be six horrible months of overwork and underpay. So, still staring at the dick, thinking he might be able to see it visibly pulse if he looked closely enough, he began to do a few simple calculations in his head: What was the probability that someone would walk into this room in the next ten minutes? Maybe 20%. What was the probability that this balding, middle-aged man would accept a blow job from him right now? Maybe 50%. What was the probability that he would regret giving this man a blowjob right now? Maybe 80%. What was the probability that, regardless of the results of all these calculations, he was going to climb under this desk and begin licking this man’s dick, base to tip, base to tip, base to tip? Maybe 100%.

---

For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 4: A Eulogy For Brad & Gideon.

Chapter 2: Guillermo's Funeral By Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 1: G and B.

text by Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

It could reasonably be posited that Bernardo’s statement at Guillermo’s funeral; “It’s true, there was no suicide....has anyone seen a body?” was in fact a true statement.

This is why Guillermo, as is the case with many people who like keeping their families on their toes, had made it clear in his Last will & testament that he would not abide an open-casket funeral. Just those seven words alone — ‘would not abide an open-casket funeral’ — implies that the putative dead person could object in the middle of the ceremony, raising themselves by sheer force of ab muscles, to demand that their casket be shut. Obviously, to be able to shout out from your casket that you’d prefer the lid closed would indicate that death had not entirely ‘taken.’ Open-casket funerals, whether by choice of the dead or their families, are ideal for those who’ve bought into the notion of that one, most problematic idea of the late, Oprah-influenced 20th century: the idea of closure. 

Closure in relation to a casket is linguistically accurate. Closure in relation to the dead is psychologically silly. 

Consider the expression often heard at funerals: “The dead live on in our memories; in our minds.” How truly frightening is this idea, and how much terror must it strike into the minds of grandchildren, now wary to experiment with masturbation should dead Uncle Dwayne or Aunt Cathy be watching from that place where they now reside; the mind of a horny child? 

Guillermo had only ever given two pieces of advice to his two sons in their times spent in the dynamic. Bernardo had always thought his dad was ‘joking around.’

1. If you must drive drunk, eat a large spoonful of peanut butter before getting in the car, as this complicates the standard breathalyzer test.

2. If you cannot beat the breathalyzer test (or for any other reason are in the company of police officers) and are subject to a lie detector test, do not despair, you can beat that as well. It’s as simple as this: no matter what the question (the one you’re meant to be honest about—your name. The one you’re meant to lie about—did you mutilate the corpse), once that query is nearing its end and your answer is meant to begin, clench your asshole like you’re trying not to shit your pants on prom night. When we focus all of our attention on that one, tight sphincter muscle (the one most associated with shame and to some extent, relaxation and satisfaction), all systems regulate to assist in maintaining its closed status. You may appear to be sweating, you may have an elevated heart rate—you may show any of the signs that interest an expert polygraphist. Unless they’ve been trained by the Central Intelligence Agency, they will not be able to differentiate between the markers exhibited by liars, and the markers of someone who just happens to have high blood pressure and hyperhidrosis. “What is key,” he told his sons, “and this part is fucking important, is that no matter what, don’t think about the lie you’re keeping, don’t think about the fact that if you blow it you might end up doing a nickel in Ossining. You need to believe, as you’re strapped to that machine, that you are in fact on the verge of shitting yourself. And you need to remember that, like any reasonable individual, be they a murderer or a cashier at Homesense, nobody, nobody, wants to shit their pants in mixed company. You are only one thing while seated in that chair, wires hooked up to god knows where. You are a man with an intense, overwhelming need to eliminate his bowels in an environment where it would be extremely embarrassing to do so.”

---

I’d been writing this sort of ‘intellectual’ porn (which really, I can’t imagine working for anyone); stories about people like Gordon and Ben, massive insertions, strange insertions, illegal insertions, pay-to-play, hotel takeovers, huge wads on hairy backs (for which I received a small bit of payola from Semenax) for years. I can’t say I particularly enjoyed it. It started when I was in prison, because I was really unhappy with the way I was being sexually assaulted, and found that, similar to prison lawyers or elegantly literate men who could write love letters to women consigned to wait at home for their lovers to be released, I had a talent; a talent that would and did forestall a prolapsed rectum courtesy of Hank, Timmy, Big Timmy, Chinese Dwight, The Accountant, Liminal Phil, and Butch 3. 

The series on Gordon and Ben, I actually had smuggled out by a friend and it ended up being published by Luridmax, an obscure French erotica publisher who focused mostly on golden shower and macrophilia narratives.

They are now out of business.

My brother Bernardo was right when he spoke of our father’s mercurial nature, the fact that he may have faked his own death—this was not out of the realm of possibility for Guillermo, but nonetheless, I am now the only living person who can both attest to the fixity of his death, as well as the manner of its deliverance. 

Dad had easily convinced Bernardo that he was an ‘academic’ working on a thesis. There are two reasons this was done so easily. One is that my brother is a dipshit, an asshat and a moron. The other is that Bernardo could not and never was able to accept the the truth of what our father was: a criminal. He didn’t play violent video games as research for a thesis, he played them because he was a violent man who liked to play violent games.

I inherited this from my father, which is why I was the sole beneficiary of his will, the same will Bernardo and my sister are still battling over in a probate court somewhere, while I live off the full inheritance in Tenerife. My father taught me much more than my brother or sister about how to live in this world (I’m sure Bernardo has used the peanut butter and lie detector test advice dad gave us to amuse people at obnoxious academic parties for years). My dad taught me how to break the law and not get caught. Here are some things I was told, having become the favorite child early on when dad caught me stuffing a Snickers in my diaper at sixteen months:

1. Your best friends are leather gloves.

2. Three things to eliminate in a jam: teeth, hands and feet. DNA is popular, but it takes a while. Head in one bag, torso in another, arms and legs in a third, hands and teeth down a sewer grate. Dump the bag head in a residential garbage can thirty miles from where you dump the torso bag, and thirty miles from where you dump the arms and legs. Ideally, dump each bag in a different state. This causes the police to engage in typical jurisdictional squabbling and creates legitimate technical problems, which can give you an astonishing head start.

3. When choosing a new identity from the grave of a dead toddler in a cemetery, pick a common name. John Smith, Alan Phillips etc. Whatever you do, do NOT pick an antiquated sounding name — no Forbes Pennyworth DeQuincy, those sort of names draw attention no matter what.

4. Whenever possible, marry the new wife in international waters. She’ll think it’s romantic, what she won’t know is that it’s not legally binding. That way, should your bigamy ever come to light, you won’t be charged. You’ll just look like an asshole.

5. Always look like an asshole.

I loved my father Guillermo DeTorquido San Felipe (né George Lazard). One thing I loved more than George though, was and is money. I was taught about this love by my father, so I know that in the end, while he might not have been ready to die, he would have respected my move. This is what’s most important to me. That while I’m certain he would have preferred to keep living, I put an end to it in a way I know he’d genuinely respect.

Bernardo with his PhD in Ancient Music. Sophia with her moronic dentist husband Lyell who’d say sorry if you hit his car. Spineless, weak people. Not me. Never me. 

“You may be a piece of shit, Carlo. You may be a shiftless predatory fuck, but you’re my son, and for fuck sake, you make me a helluva lot more proud than your brother and sister, living their lives inside the lines. Honestly if I didn’t have warrants out at the time, I would’ve stuck em’ both in a sleeping bag full of rocks and thrown them in the river.”

Words like these from a parent, they feel real good.

It happened like this.

My dad had just finished a three-year bit. Bernardo and Sophia thought he’d been living in Tucson, running a ‘workshop’ on some type of bullshit.

I was looking at eleven more months of a six-year sentence for felony battery. Dad had been the only one who visited me (or the only one I allowed to visit) during that time. It was on one of his last visits that he told me he’d cut my siblings out of the will, because, as he put it rather succinctly, “Fuck em.”

By the time I made it back to my cell, I had the entire thing planned perfectly. I almost wanted to call my dad and tell him, but….

My cellmate, John Allan Richards, had terminal lung cancer, was facing compassionate early release after serving almost twenty years for bank robbery. We’d developed a good, quasi-paternal relationship over our time together. Once I learned about the will, I told John that, since he’d be getting out, and since he wouldn’t have much time left out there, I had a story to tell him. I wasn’t asking per se, but I knew that since his doctors had told him he should already be dead, that old-fashioned prison ethics would steer him in the direction I needed.

Look John, I never wanted to bring it up — it’s too hard, this sort of language. I told him how my father Guillermo had molested my sister Sophia from when she was five to thirteen. John had three daughters. It would strike him where I needed him struck. “Jesus fucking Christ, Carl. This is no good. No, this is just no good. And he’s out there still?”

I told him he was.

“I sort of suspected John,” I told him. “Sophia was always sick, always sad, had no friends, acted too clingy when I brought male friends home. I knew my dad, I knew he was a sick fuck, there wasn’t anything I’d put past him. But it wasn’t until I was sixteen, going through his VHS collection looking for porn that I found the tape. It was the only one with a handwritten label.”

“What’d it say?” he asked, looking already like he wanted to reach through the prison, send his arm through the streets of Philadelphia and rip my dad’s throat out.

“It said ‘Little Blondes’...”

“For fuck sake!” he cut me off.

“I know, I know. I put the tape in. Well, there she was John, Sophia. I turned it off right away. I knew there’d be other blondes. I mean, fuck sake, she was mostly a redhead.”

“Alright, Carl. I want to help you with this. Cause this…I can’t abide this.”

It’s not just a myth of film and television that pedophiles are considered to be subhuman scum in prison. Just as in the real world, they’re seen as such. Everything came into motion so easily. He actually coaxed the information out of me, which was beautiful. I told him where my father lived and where my father drank, because I knew those things. He was still sending me letters, often just written on coasters from the bar. John’s date was coming up soon. The cancer had spread to his brain, he was starting to forget things and would wake up with subdural hematomas that looked like mandarin oranges. I think I’m making my point.

Carl was released on June 15th, 2009. We had a party for him, Vino brought an empty Tide container of his best pruno. At the end, when he was leaving the cell, Carl took my head in his hands and looked me in the eyes.

“I got this, John. Fuck this bullshit. I can’t abide it. I just cannot abide it. Plus, it’s likely bullshit, but maybe if I can do one good thing in this life, make some stab at redemption or whatever, God might not shit on me so heavily.”

I told Carl I loved him. I did love him. Then I slipped him the piece of paper with my father’s address on it.

July 3rd, it was in the news, which is how I heard about it first. It took Bernardo a few days to call and tell me, probably ‘cause he was playing the ocarina or some bullshit at a recital in Sonoma or Marfa.

Guillermo DeTorquido San Felipe, aged 69, was leaving the bar he drank at regularly to walk to his home three blocks away. In the neighborhood, most people avoided San Felipe. They heard he’d done some shit, and he never smiled. But, if you had a flat, he was gonna fix it for you. As he approached his home, John Allan Richards, notorious for a bank robbing spree that stretched from Abilene to Austin and released from prison weeks before on compassionate grounds, approached San Felipe in the middle of the street, brandishing a handgun and visibly limping. He was heard to shout, “Hey, short eyes!” immediately before pressing his revolver against San Felipe’s head and pulling the trigger. San Felipe died instantly. Richards did not run or hide his gun. Instead he sat on the curb next to the body. When the police came he was taken to central booking. There was no clear motive for the slaying, and police were perplexed as to why a man who’d just been released after serving two decades in the penitentiary would execute what appeared to be a stranger, resulting in his return to the penitentiary.

For three days, police questioned Richards. They pressed for his motives, enquired as to his relationship to the victim—these sort of police questions. Richards would only say one thing: “He had it coming.” Police were at a loss to understand. San Felipe had served his time in prison, mostly for wire fraud or the occasional aggravated assault. There was nothing that would explain a revenge-motivated execution in the middle of the street.

On his fourth day of interrogation, Richards asked Detective Leslie Morris to get him a Sprite. He said his mouth was dry from “talking to you fucking goofs for so long.” 

When Detective Morris returned to interview room eight, Richards lay slumped on the floor, dead. An autopsy later revealed him to be stuffed with tumors, and his personal physician later stated his surprise that Richards was still living.

The will went through probate quickly. I received very little in terms of liquid assets or investment products. I did, however, inherit an antique briefcase. Inside this briefcase was a small card — “It’s a boy!” The envelope held the key to a storage space. The day before the funeral, I rented a car and drove for an hour. Behind a bunch of lamps and stolen dishwashers I found a suitcase containing one and a half million dollars in small bills.

Once my lawyer informed Bernardo and Sophia’s lawyers that the will was incontestable, Sophia apparently expressed surprise that I was alive. I hadn’t seen them for over fifteen years.

At the internment, I stood mixed in with a group of mourners at a nearby funeral while Guillermo’s was happening. I watched Bernardo deliver his ‘clever’ speech, and Sophia her saccharine one. Once everyone was gone, I left a bouquet of tulips and a bottle of Wild Turkey on dad’s grave. I didn’t want anyone to see me. I’m sure nobody wanted to see me either.

Before I left for Tenerife, I paid for John Allan Richards’ tombstone. He had no family, and no money, and would’ve been buried in a potter’s field. He’d done me a great service, and really, John had never done anything worse than rob a bank. A thing that, really, all of us are entitled to try.

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For more from Brad Phillips, follow  @brad___phillips on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 3: Luridly Liminal / Liminally Lurid.

Chapter 1: G and B By Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

Over the next year, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month.

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

At Guillermo’s funeral, his son Bernardo said something like, “Hello everyone, and thank you for coming. As you all know, my father liked to keep the world on its toes, so I’ll honor him by formally announcing that he isn’t dead.”

The mourners laughed. 

Bernardo then said something like, “I mean it. There was no suicide. Has anyone seen a body? I didn’t think so. My father is currently shopping for groceries to stock the fridge of his new condo situated on the beach of a tropical island nation.”

The mourners shifted in their seats. 

Bernardo then said something like, “This funeral is another one of his projects. It is part of the thesis he spent decades beating like a dead horse and yet never actually articulated because he wanted to remain mysterious—his big idea that there is nothing funnier than a mismatch of perceived stakes. This is why, as a child, I would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and find him playing my most violent video game, giggling to himself as he committed heinous acts against the game’s innocent characters, bystanders just running errands or commuting to work. And it’s why you’re all gathered here today laying flowers on an empty grave.”

The mourners exchanged looks. 

Bernardo then said something like, “In short, my father is alive and well, and apparently a bigger prankster than ever. Thank you for participating in his funeral, thank you for your time, and my sincerest apologies for his unique sense of humor.” 

Bernardo returned to his seat. Guillermo’s sister walked to the podium and delivered a really beautiful and moving eulogy. 

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Gordon didn’t want to fuck Ben in person because Ben wasn’t that cute, but he thought sexting with Ben could be fun, especially if he was able to convince him to send him videos of his winking asshole, so he messaged Ben on the dating app they matched on, saying, I know it’s only 9PM but I’m in bed already and it feels VERY good. What are you up to?

Gordon played chess on his phone for a bit and was starting to fall asleep when Ben messaged back saying, I’m also in bed early like a grandpa and proud of it. Am watching bad TV. Gordon thought about ignoring the message, silencing his phone, and rolling over, but the small chance that this interaction might lead to him ejaculating soon was enough to make him rub the fatigue from his eyes and respond with, I think getting to know each other a bit would be more fun than bad TV, don’t you? Ben said, I agree.

The question now was how quickly could Gordon drive the conversation to sex. Would Ben be turned off if he didn’t warm things up with flirtatious banter? Or would he be refreshed and relieved by honesty and transparency, as he also didn’t think Gordon was cute enough to fuck in person, but also wanted to see some dick and butt before bed? 

Gordon decided to cut to the chase but to do so in a way that made it clear he was aware he was cutting to the chase. OK, so forgive me if this is too sudden and out of left field, but I have to be up super early in the morning and I think you’re super cute. So, I propose a game: You tell me something I can send you right now—words, photo, video whatever—that would make for your ideal stranger-made masturbation material, and I’ll tell you what you could send me right now that would be my ideal stranger-made masturbation material. Then we’ll both take a sec to make each other our perfect customized little sexy gift, and then when we’re done, we’ll press send at the exact same time. What do you think???

A few minutes went by with no response from Ben. Gordon started to suspect he’d just offended an innocent, possibly prudish man. The thought of it made him feel sad, so he messaged, Shit, I’m sorry if that was not at all what your looking for one these apps. Please feel free to ignore that dumb idea if I offended you! Either way, hope to run into you sometime somehow somewhere. Sleep well :) Ben immediately responded, Sorry got distracted by the bad TV and didn’t see your message. But YES lol that’s a brilliant idea. Les do it. 

Gordon felt more awake now. He sat up in bed and composed his request. OK, so I think it would be really really sexy if you placed your phone on the floor and stood over it, naked, spreading your ass cheeks slightly and flexing your pelvic muscles so that your asshole winks. I know that’s a bit of a specific ask, but I think it sounds hot and if you do that for like 30 seconds I’ll probably explode very quickly over here. I’d love to cum long and hard while seeing you do that for me...He considered how he would feel receiving this message. He also considered how he would feel if it was screenshotted and ended up on social media and everyone he knew saw him ask a stranger for this video. Then he pressed send. 

Ben responded, I love it. OK, I want you to send me video of you putting a wine bottle in your ass. Gordon laughed out loud. He wrote, lol I’m not sure thats possible. Ben didn’t say anything. Gordon touched his asshole with his fingertips. He messaged, OK. I’ll...try...

He went to his kitchen to get a wine bottle. He emptied out what was left of a cheap red into the sink—less than a glass. He grabbed lube from his bedside drawer, and thoroughly lubed up his asshole. He lubed up the skinny end of the bottle. He propped his phone up onto his pillow, pressed record and laid back, lifting his hips to make his asshole visible to the camera. 

It quickly became clear that he had far too tight a sphincter for the job, but he managed to get the bottle almost a quarter of the way inside himself, and he hoped his effort, paired with some theatrical moans, would make up for the incomplete task. He stopped the recording. He edited out the beginning few seconds, the part that showed him pressing record, leaning back and putting his hips in the air, and he edited out the last few seconds, the part that showed him removing the bottle and stopping the recording. He messaged Ben, I’m ready when you are. Send on the count of three? 

Ben messaged back, One. Gordon messaged back, 2. Ben messaged back, Three. Gordon selected the video and pressed send. He sat waiting for Ben’s video to arrive, his dick hard with anticipation. He waited a minute, assuming he hadn’t received Ben’s video yet because Ben’s video was a big file, that Ben had gone above and beyond the call of duty and winked his asshole for more than thirty seconds.

After a few more minutes, Gordon started to feel impatient. Resend? yours didn’t go through. An error sign popped up saying the message couldn’t be delivered. Gordon closed the dating app, reopened it, retyped the message. Resend! Your video didn’t g through or something?! The error sign popped up again. Gordon closed the dating app, reopened it, and this time, when he tried to message Ben, Ben’s profile was gone from his list of matches. Ben had unmatched with him. 

Gordon jumped out of his bed and opened Instagram. He searched users who had the word Ben in their Instagram handles and scrolled through hundreds of profiles, squinting his eyes to see if any of them were Ben. After a while, he started to feel tired again, so he wiped the leftover lube off his slightly sore asshole and started a new game of chess that he eventually forfeited because he fell asleep before either player achieved checkmate. 

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Guy was the name Bo gave his French alter-ego that came out sometimes when he was in a good mood, usually after meditating for twenty minutes, practicing gratitude for ten minutes, doing one hour of aerobic exercise, and eating a home-cooked, high-protein, low-carb meal. 

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When Brett was ten years old, his best friend Gregory started hanging out with other kids in their neighborhood because, deep down, they both knew that hanging out with each other didn’t count as hanging out at all, and Gregory had reached the point of his young adulthood when he wanted stuff to start counting. 

Brett wasn’t offended or hurt by Gregory’s disloyalty. His leaving the bubble of their best-friendship felt natural and unavoidable. In the moments when Brett felt like confronting Gregory, he’d put on his sneakers and start the five-block walk to go knock on Gregory’s front door, but always end up turning around when the house came into view. Then, on the walk home, the left side of Brett’s head would ache a little, an ache that was the result of some inchoate part of his brain trying to come to a realization about inefficacy, about how you can’t change what is already in motion, and since everything is always in motion, you can’t change anything. 

If Brett was just a few years older, this might have led him down an existential rabbit hole about free will, which might have led him to his first proper dalliance with suicidal ideation, followed by an involuntary slap to his own face that was equal parts self-harm and self-preservation. But, at this moment, Brett still had the prefrontal cortex of a child, and so, he just hummed the tune of a song that didn’t exist and kicked a stone down the street like some 1950s sitcom kid. 

In late August, not long before school was due to start, Brett and Gregory hadn’t seen each other in two weeks, the longest they’d gone without contact since they were toddlers. Brett’s mother noticed Gregory’s recent absence from her house, so she called Gregory’s mother, who she tolerated more than liked, and asked if the woman’s son wanted to come over and play. Gregory’s mother said yes, Gregory would like to play, and that he’d be there in ten minutes. 

An hour later, Gregory knocked on Brett’s door. Brett answered and saw that Gregory was with another boy, a lanky kid from the grade above them. Brett told them to come in the house, but they said they were supposed to meet up with a group of kids near the old out-of-commission train bridge behind the public tennis courts, that they were playing Capture the Flag. Brett asked his mother if he could go, and she said OK, just be home by dinner. 

They walked in the direction of the bridge. The older boy was leading the way, then Gregory, then Brett. No one said anything for a while. They just walked. Brett tried to think of something to ask them to break the silence. He remembered that the letters notifying students which class they would be in in the fall were about to be mailed out, and he considered asking if they’d received their class assignments even though he knew they had not. He was about to open his mouth when, out of nowhere, or maybe out of somewhere that’s just not somewhere people know about, it dawned on him that Gregory and the older boy were giving him the quiet and stillness he needed in order to hear the soft soundtrack of everything that was about to happen.

So, Brett focused. He tuned out his footsteps and heartbeat, and he listened carefully. He heard the following: the distant voices of more boys from the grade above, chatting and joking in a tone they would not chat and joke in once he arrived at the bridge; the whispers that the boys in the grade above whispered to each other once he did arrive at the bridge; the slobbery licks of a dog’s tongue lapping at a chocolate milkshake one of the boys had spilled into an empty pizza box; the loud rushing of the river below, deep this summer because of unusually heavy rains; the scrape of an old rusted car bumper being dragged by two boys across old rusted steel beams; the soft “here boy” and “good boy” and “thatta boy” that one of the boys used to coax the dog into standing still enough for him to tie a rope around its torso; the buckling crunch of the metal bumper as the other end of the rope was tightly secured around its torso; the heightened silence of having everyone’s eyes on you while your body is carefully positioned to create enough leverage in your heel to do the very thing those eyes don’t expect you to do.

Gregory’s sneeze broke the silence when they were still a few blocks from the tennis courts that abutted the trailhead that led to the bridge. Brett started to hear his own footsteps and heartbeat again. He said, “God bless you.” Gregory acknowledged the courtesy with a small nod and unleashed a hard kick on a soda can that was sitting on the edge of the sidewalk, sending it tumbling into traffic. 

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Baxter said, “Ha. Ha. Ha...” With pauses in between each “ha” to make it funny. Gerald said, “Ha. Ha. Ha...” with even longer pauses in between each “ha” to make it even funnier. 

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For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 2: Guillermo’s Funeral.

Read Artist Brad Phillips' Suicide Note

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Tomorrow, Freddy Gallery in Baltimore will open "Problem Is You," a group exhibition featuring three artists: Aaron Carpenter, Philip Hinge, and the very much alive (but maybe not well) Brad Phillips. Instead of a traditional statement about the exhibition and the artists, the gallery offers a morbid, but brilliant, suicide note penned by Phillips, which probably sums up the exhibition more than any standard press release could. If you don't follow Phillips on Instagram, you should - it is an extenuation of the artist's unique practice that ranges from delicate near-photorealistic paintings to text based play-on-words to prose - his book Suicidal Realism is out now on the Swimmer's Group imprint. In the following suicide note, Brad Phillips offers his disdain for the mechanics of the art world and he narrates a spiritual journey of selfhood and artisthood in the midst of self doubt, depression and addition. 

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Suicide Note 2015

by BRAD PHILLIPS

It’s that time again. Because it could be that time again. And this always needs revising. Things change; new people have betrayed me, I love new people, I’ve betrayed new people. But a suicide note should  traditionally always be about self hatred or aloof disenchantment with the experience of living.. Those people that write bitter blameful suicide notes don’t deserve the back-flip out of existence that suicide so beautifully offers us all.

In this iteration, I could for example, send out a fuck you to my ex wife in Vancouver Pat Cowan who never visited me in rehab and then kept the few objects that were precious to me ransom for three years hoping that one day I would twist myself into a gargoyle of apology that suited her own permanently scorned, emotionally static childlike blamelessness. But that’s not my style.

Love and money. In the last year I came to know a love I did not know existed. Unconditional. What you hear about in Helen Hunt movies. I met a woman, Lazara, who accepted me for who I was, who did not wish to change anything about me, and who let me be myself, which is not always a pleasant thing to endure. I have spent my life pretending I could change for people. I cannot change. Now the experience of being accepted as I truly am has opened up the world to me in a way I didn’t imagine possible. It’s truly beautiful. But that doesn’t mean I can continue to endure the world that she helped me expand. My being allowed to be myself is in some ways truly frightening. I always resented being asked to change this or that, but I also assumed those requests were fair, because I saw myself as a monstrous burden to those who loved me. That this woman, like some precious angel, is able to carry that weight – this in itself could be contorted, in the right mental state, as a new and different reason to end my life, because how could I let someone so brave and so kind endure so very much? Because I am far too much. I can barely lift my head, how she can carry all of me is unthinkable. I love this woman so much that it would just be another example of my own selfishness to let her take the blows my personality and instincts unknowingly reign down on her psyche, even if she is, of now, unaware of the assault.

2007 I had a solo show at Liste in Basel with a gallery in Switzerland I was working with. At the time I was with my aforementioned ex wife. I had had a very depressing year. Like the one before, like the one after, like this one, like the year of my birth. Being not that bright, I worked very hard on making the best paintings I could, and assumed that if this show went well, then the sun would shine down on me and my problems would be vanquished. Because I was naive then, at 33 I was painfully naive still. Hours before the fair even opened, my dealers told me that the esteemed Hauser and Wirth Gallery had bought my entire show. While other dealers were putting nails in the wall, my dealers put their feet on the desk. They called me ex wife and I into the booth and told me the news. I made something like seventy thousand Euros in fifteen minutes for a year’s worth of work. My ex wife beamed, my dealers beamed. I stood there like a man who had just been hung but the rope broke. I had no words. I went  to the lounge and ordered a drink, my wife followed me, we went downstairs, and I buried my face in her breast and wept like an insane person. Because nothing had changed. I felt no better. I felt no accomplishment. I felt no pride or relief. What I felt was a terrifying sameness. And in that moment, I realized that art was not the thing that would fill the hole in me. And money was not it either. All the money did was give me more money to fill my body with drugs and alcohol. Which I did promptly, for three years and change, having shows here and there where my work suffered, until I ended up living with a psychopath and a single father, drinking every waking hour and wandering skid row puking on my shoes and scoring dope.

In 2012 I went to rehab. I was 38. I was naive at 38 in that I thought if I stopped being a drug addict and an alcoholic, I would feel better. I spent three months there and nine in a halfway house and moved back to Toronto to be near my family. It was a slow motion re-enactment of my sold out show five years before. I took the drugs and the alcohol away, and I felt no better. I just experienced the reality of my mind soberly. I had a minor nervous breakdown. What lives in me is a hole. I have spent my life trying to fill it. I don’t know if I was born with this hole inside of me, or if it was carved or shot or eaten out by experience. But what I do know is that I’ve tried to fill it with everything imaginable. Sex shoplifting art women booze heroin marijuana television reading writing meditating basketball Percocet Jim Beam Ativan Budweiser Philip Roth BDSM. But the hole is insatiable. What it wants to be filled with is the end of me. I am emotionally self anthropophagous. I eat away at myself until there is nothing left. And I’ve done such a good job of it, that now, at 41, crawling into bed feels like crawling into a foxhole, getting into the shower feels like moving a piano, and I’ve eaten away at the energy I need to continue.

Young people have faith in art. Some of them think it can make them money. It has become professionalized. Some of them will make money. I was one. But faith in something that the world doesn’t need is a dangerous thing to stake your life on. I have been known primarily for making paintings. For this last show in Baltimore there are no paintings. Because my paintings aren’t mine anymore, I make ‘Brad Phillipsy’ paintings. I make paintings that look like what I make, like what people have come to expect from me. I’ve started to making paintings the way people in pornography have sex. It looks real to the viewer, but there’s no sincerity in the movement. Scenes stop and start again. Dicks go limp, people cry, lights burn out. And that is where I’ve ended up. A burned out starlet from a small town with dreams of moving from the adult film world to television then to movies, living in a trailer behind a car dealership in San Luis Obispo.

If I die before he does, Aaron Carpenter is to execute my wishes. Which are few. Give it all away to the dwindling number of people I haven’t isolated. Apologize to everyone. Cut my arms and legs off and leave me in the forest.

Life is beautiful and this is true. But the greatest beauty in being alive is that we can stop the whole show in an instant if we choose to, and I’d rather exit now with some sense of empowerment than dwindle and shrink further into myself until my spine and my belly button kiss each other and I writhe on the ground like a sun bleached salamander.

I love everyone that ever touched me.

Brad Phillips, May 15, 2015

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"Problem Is You," featuring Aaron Carpenter, Philip Hinge, and Brad Phillips will be on view from June 13 to July 11th, 2015 at Freddy Gallery, 510 W. Franklin Street. Click here to read our interview with Brad Phillips. Text by Brad Phillips. 

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